In 2016, Montgomery County, Maryland revamped the approach with which the planning department reviews transportation impacts of site development. The development of the 2017 Local Area Transportation Review Guidelines included a comprehensive and collaborative review of alternative approaches to growth management and resulted in the development of more robust and multimodal analytic approaches, a set of context-sensitive and multimodal trip generation rates, and a commitment to continue the development of pro-rata share districts in lieu of traditional traffic impact studies. The 2017 guidelines were developed with the benefit of a review of contemporary best practices nationwide and a 30-person working group representing various transportation impact review stakeholder interests that convened 21 times over the course of 3 years. The new approach was developed to balance three potentially competing objectives: streamline the process in smart growth areas of the county, increase the degree of multimodalism, and increase the degree of robustness in the analytic approach and data. The key additions to the process included establishing policy area groupings based on transportation demand characteristics; developing a set of context-sensitive, multimodal trip generation rates; and introducing quantitative tests for non-auto impacts. This paper highlights both the process and outcomes of the updated approach.
Montgomery County, Maryland has an Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO) that requires the county's Planning Board to determine that available or programmed transportation facilities can accommodate the peak-period trips that a proposed residential or commercial subdivision will generate before they can approve that subdivision. This requirement generates nearly continuous discussion among policy makers, residents, property developers, and other interest groups about what it means for a transportation system to be adequate. Since 2007, the county's biennial growth policy has addressed that issue with a measure called Policy Area Mobility Review (PAMR). The review uses a regional travel-demand model to consider current and future system performance across 32 policy areas that range in size from ten to thirty square miles. The PAMR analysis integrates transit system and roadway system mobility measures, incorporating a county policy that transportation-system equity can be maintained by allowing more congestion in areas with better transit service. The regional nature of the PAMR analysis provides geographic and analytic capabilities beyond the typical traffic-impact study. The Montgomery County Planning Board (MCPB) uses PAMR for both near-term subdivision regulation for compliance with the APFO and long-term master-planning purposes. These characteristics of the PAMR application, plus context-sensitive development-mitigation approaches including peak-hour vehicle trip-reduction measures, additional public transit capacity, and nonautomobile-transportation facilities, help improve the sustainability of new development. This article describes how PAMR has worked and the issues its use has generated in integrating sustainability into the transportation-planning process.
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